Fan Recaps and Comments:

at the catalyst in santa cruz, last night.
rating: five stars, six jalapenjos and a trip to disneyland with corey haim

carmaig deforest came on at 9pm. i have seen this guy before fronting another band, the screaming pumpkins, and i was told that he was also in less and the lovejoys or something. i guess band names don't mean a lot to some people.

anyway, his band was your regular guitarbassdrum trio, kinda noisy but generally well-behaved. what did carmaign play? ukelele, of course. and he sings in a really tense, twisted-up way, kinda reminds me of the violent femmes. his songs have a lot of charm, and he really shreds on the uke. the uke is definitely not a joke. a good opening band.

* * *

okay, so if you don't like they might be giants you won't want to listen
to my description of the great time you didn't have at the show last night,
so stop here. you poor poor poor person.

* * *

tmbg came on at 10:20 and were great until about 11:40. that seems like sort of a short set, now that i think about it, but the whole thing was a blast. john-with-a-left-handed-guitar is this sort of big, slightly pudgy guy with glasses who jumps all over the stage, and john-with-an-accordion is skinny, wears unfaded jeans and a flannel shirt and hardly ever moves.

the first thing that struck me about the show was how really *normal* they seem. they're not even trying to act cool -- in fact they seemed a little nervous at the catalyst, which fits about 200 people, even though i knew they had just survived the warfield.

for the first song, "lie still little bottle," john-accordion played the bass saxophone and john-guitar sang, to the rhythm of one of three metronomes they had set up on the back of the stage, and that was it. they did several songs like that, with no tape backup and just one or two instruments, very different from their albums. and the songs all held up, surprisingly.

there were some great moments, like when the miniature slam pit in the front started square dancing to "cowtown". and they said some really funny stuff about the last time they were in santa cruz and the audience threw lucky charms at them.

"we'd like to say to the person who took
the fender off our van today:
we still don't forgive you.
and to the person we ran into the last
time were were here:
we hope you forgive us."

they didn't play "hope that i get old," or my request, "hi, we're the replacements," but they played just about all of their other stuff. for "whistling in the dark," john-guitar played a marching band bass drum while the roadies fixed his broken guitar pedal.
when the lights came on, i jumped on stage and stole john-accordion's
evian water bottle. it's funny, tmbg are impossible to worship because they're so utterly unhip in person. i hope i can be that unhip someday. sigh . . .